A smart cruise control (SCC) system detects movement of a preceding vehicle using a radar mounted on a front portion of a vehicle, thereby controlling engine and brakes to maintain a distance from the preceding vehicle.
An SCC radar, which is an essential part of the system, is most preferably provided at the front center of the vehicle in order to ensure excellent performance. A radiator grill or the emblem or the decoration of a vehicle maker is commonly positioned at the front center of the vehicle.
Typically, the radiator grill is made of metal and plated with chrome to prevent corrosion.
However, metal adversely affects the transmission and perturbs reception of the radio waves of the SCC radar due to the low radio-wave penetrability thereof. Therefore, efforts to replace a portion of the radiator grill with a separate radar cover have been made in order to ensure predetermined radio-wave penetrability to thus smoothly transmit and receive radio waves.
However, the radar cover has been manufactured without metal in order to ensure radio-wave penetrability. Accordingly, the radar cover does not have consistency in design with respect to the radiator grill made of metal.
In order to solve the problem, a technology for applying indium or tin, having excellent radio-wave penetrability, to a portion of a conventional radar cover to thus implement a metallic texture has been developed.
For example, as shown in FIG. 1, black paint is applied on a transparent layer of a PC material in order to expose only a portion intended to exhibit a metallic texture, indium is deposited thereon, and the rear side of a cover is subjected to double injection molding using an AES material, thus manufacturing a conventional SCC cover.
However, the cost of a radar unit may be increased because indium or tin is a relatively expensive material and in that the durability of the cover, which is adjacent to the vehicle engine, may be reduced due to the low melting point of the material.
Details described as the background art are provided for the purpose of better understanding the background of the invention, but are not to be taken as an admission that the described details correspond to the conventional technology already known to those skilled in the art.